A radio node in a wireless communication system typically determines the rate at which it receives units of data erroneously from another radio node. Conventional approaches to determining this error rate involve identifying how may data units are received erroneously out of some total number of considered data units. This error rate can be used to improve transmission between the radio nodes.
Consider an example in the context of a Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (MBMS). MBMS is a broadcasting technique for E-UTRAN to optimize the downlink radio resource usage in scenarios where a large amount of users are interested in receiving the same content. A transport channel called the Multicast Channel (MCH) supports MBMS. A radio node typically determines a so-called MCH block error rate (BLER) as the rate at which it receives MCH transport blocks erroneously from another radio node. The node computes the MCH BLER over a measurement period as the ratio between the number of received MCH transport blocks resulting in a Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) error and the total number of MCH transport blocks received within the measurement period (at least those that use the same modulation and coding scheme).
In this context and others, known approaches statically fix the total number of data units that are considered for determining the error rate. This means that, as a radio node updates its error rate determination by making different determinations over time, the radio node makes those different error rate determinations based on inspecting the same number of received data units for errors.